The GOP and Guns: We’ve Got Nothing

I FIRST POSTED THIS STORY in October, in the wake of a massacre on the Las Vegas streets. Sadly, today we can recycle it, word by bloody word.

All we need are a few fresh tears.

This morning twenty-six Americans, ages 5-72, do not wake up to worry about health care or border walls or transgender people using the same bathrooms. 

They do not wake up at all.

A gunman armed with a military-style Ruger AR-15, the weapon of choice of most modern psychopaths, shoots up a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The toll, including wounded, rises to 46.

What an unspeakable tragedy this is. And what will Republican leaders do now that they control all the necessary levers of power to make a change?

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Thoughts and prayers will be offered. That’s not enough. We can spend $21.6 billion (if not three times that much) to build a “big, beautiful wall” along our border to keep “criminals” and “rapists” out.

But we can’t lift a legislative little finger to staunch the carnage in our churches, schools and on our streets? We can’t act, no matter how sensible policy changes might be, no matter how limited the steps we might take? We can’t do anything at all—because the NRA crowd holds GOP lawmakers’ nuts in a vice?

Here is what I said a month ago. Here is what I fear we will be talking about again and again in weeks and months and years to come.

*

MASS MURDER PLAYS out in America again. The tragedy in Las Vegas follows scenes equally terrible at the Pulse Nightclub in 2016, at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2014, at the Century 16 Theater in 2012. There are too many senseless mass shootings in this country even to mention or list.

At this point all the leading voices in the Republican Party offer  are thoughts and prayers.

Turn on the news right now. Turn on Fox—NBC—or CNN. You’ll hear the same questions you heard last time and you’re going to hear again, sometime much too soon. What was the shooter’s motivation? Were there accomplices? Did neighbors know he harbored a sickness? 

You will hear the same shaken voices of survivors—a girlfriend of a wounded concert goer, her blouse specked with blood, a visitor to Las Vegas from Canada who caught the shooting in a choppy video on his phone, a local man, a fan of country music, thanking first responders who helped him escape the gory scene. A grim-faced sheriff will look into a bank of cameras and tell us what authorities so far know. Search warrants will be issued for the perpetrator’s car and home.

The death toll will climb in the hours and days to come, as critically wounded human beings succumb.

The same debates we’ve heard before will be heard again. Guns don’t kill people, people…. Fuck it.

Why even finish that sentence?

We will be told that it makes no sense to ban sales of semi-automatic or automatic weapons because any truly sick individual can kill you with a car, club, bare fists, a goddamn knife, fork or spoon.

You’ll hear right-wing conspiracy types insist this was a government-sponsored job, so liberal politicians in Washington will have an excuse to confiscate all the guns. That’s the sick and pathetic line pedaled by gun nuts (and not all gun owners are nuts) after the massacre of teachers and children at Sandy Hook. No one ever saw the bodies, they howled. The slaughter must have been faked.

See, for example: Alex Jones.

After that tragedy, you hoped something positive might result. You thought, maybe, Wayne LaPierre and his NRA buddies would relent. Six- and seven-year-olds, torn to pieces by bullets, sprayed from an AR-15 in the hands of an unbalanced teen. Even the NRA, you hoped, would balk at that.

President Obama called for action. Thinking of his own children he began to cry.

The Democrats couldn’t get a bill passed—even to limit the size of gun magazines for sale.

Republican refused to act.

JUST THE OPPOSITE in fact: Beholden to the NRA for support and massive infusions of campaign cash, the GOP pushed to extend gun rights. Open carry laws proliferated across the states. Under Republican rule, it became easier to get concealed carry licenses than access to the voting booth. In fact, Congress is currently considering a bill to allow more Americans, including the kind of crazed killer who just sprayed a Las Vegas crowd, to buy silencers for their weapons.

At this point, we might as well be blunt. We’ve heard every argument from the right we can ever hear. In the wake of the bloodbath at the Pulse Nightclub we heard the problem was not guns. The problem was terrorists. 

Or, from true right-wing haters, we heard, “The problem is Muslims. We must ban them all from coming to America if we want to be safe.”

We heard that Mexican immigrants were the threat. What we had to have was a long and tall wall. On right-wing television and right-wing radio stories of individual tragedies were endlessly reported—and they were tragedies indeed—of this illegal immigrant or that, who came here and killed.

We had to keep those people out too.

We heard about carnage in Chicago. We heard right-wing types hint the problem there was…well, to be frank…black people with guns.

Black people were the problem.

Not guns.

In the wake of multiple school shootings we were told the only way to protect our children would be to arm teachers—so that in crowded third grade classrooms, hallways filled with middle school teens or at drop off times in front of our high schools, educators could counter incoming fire with outgoing fire of their own.

There was nothing else we could do.

If we tried—if, for example, we required background checks for private sales at gun shows—the Second Amendment was dead.

IT WASN’T JUST TRAGIC. It was ludicrous and insane. Paranoia substituted for policy. All too often the real issue was profit, not even people. Gun sales meant billions for manufacturers every year. We heard from a thousand right-wing voices: Obama planned to take away all our guns! We heard that again, during the last campaign. According to Candidate Trump, his opponent would abolish the Second Amendment if she won.

Yet, the facts pointed in the opposite direction. According to the FBI, based on background checks nationwide, during eight years Obama was in office, approximately 14 million guns were sold—in 2009 alone. Sales increased—I suppose to replace all the imaginary guns Obama was supposedly taking away—almost every year: 14.4 million in 2010; 16.5 million in 2011; 19.6 million in 2012; 21.1 million the year after that. There was a “dip” in 2014. Only 20.9 million more guns and pistols hit America’s streets. In 2015 and 2016, however, banner sales occurred: 23.1 and 27.5 million more weapons went into our purses, cars and homes.

That’s 157.1 million background checks and roughly that many more guns.

In theory, then, we became, as citizens of this nation, safer with each passing day. We would stop killers in their tracks. We would pull pistols from our purses and defend ourselves. And let’s be clear: We do have gun rights. The Second Amendment is there in the Constitution for a clear reason.

But there are sensible limits on all rights. “Fighting words,” the courts have ruled, are not protected speech. You can’t urge people when a brawl is about to occur to hit foes over the head with lead pipes. Nor does freedom of religion allow you to start a church and practice polygamy like kings of old.

And all the paranoia and all the political shouting haven’t made us safe. The right can’t blame today’s tragedy on terrorists or immigrants or Hillary Clinton. One angry white male, a citizen of the United States, heavily armed with automatic weapons, using a supply of high-capacity magazines to allow sheets of rapid fire, and strategically located on the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, just murdered fifty-eight other Americans and wounded countless more.

Law-abiding citizens can now arm themselves to their eyeteeth. What good has it done? More American kids are accidentally killed by guns every year than are ever killed by illegal immigrants who, we are told, we must block with a wall. More drivers and passengers are killed and wounded in incidents of road rage than die at the hands of terrorists in twelve months. Americans are cut down in churches, shot at work by disgruntled former employers, killed by enraged former husbands at parties, blown away on community college campuses, and now massacred at concerts on the Las Vegas strip.

Who do you blame today? What do we, as a nation, do—other than mop up the blood and move on till the next time the sirens wail?

HOW MANY GUNS DO WE ALL NEED before we can finally staunch the flow of blood on our streets?

Republicans control all the levers of power in our nation’s capital today. They control most state capitals as well.

What ideas to stem the mayhem will they offer today, tomorrow or next week? Is the answer again going to be: Nothing but thoughts and prayers?

Or: Buy one gun, get one free?

How long can the gun manufacturers—merchants of death as surely as captains of slave ships 1n 1808—continue to buy the silence of lawmakers with fat campaign donations every two or four years? At some point, doesn’t the dam of citizen horror for lives lost finally break?

The American people want to know what their leaders will say. They don’t want the sounds of automatic weapons fire to be all they hear this week—and the next time—and the next after that.

Say a prayer for all the lives lost, yes. 

Keep the bereaved families in your thoughts.

But if that’s all the GOP has to offer, the next time we have a mass shooting event, let’s be honest. Let President Trump stride to the podium, bow his head slightly and speak to the gathered cameras. Let him be totally honest.

“We’ve got nothing to offer,” he should say.

***

I wrote about this before, after the slaughter of the innocents at Sandy Hook. Nothing has changed for the good since that day.

Only the pools of blood change.

How many will die next time?